The names of states and nations are never without a freight of ideology, and unifying national terminologies are always liable to become a focus for conflict between different constructions of their meaning. There can be few more striking instances than the language of Britain and Britishness. From the Middle Ages onward, the idea of Britain has played a varied and important role in the history of England and its insular neighbors.Footnote 1 Though historians have long recognized the significance of the idea, there have been few detailed attempts to investigate the meanings that were associated with it.Footnote 2 Concentrating mainly on historiographical texts, this study traces the conceptualizations of Britain that were current from the twelfth to the early seventeenth centuries.
Descriptions of British geography were a medieval commonplace, but the importance of Britain as a geopolitical concept from the twelfth century onward derives mainly from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (Historia regum Britanniae).Footnote 3 Completed about 1138, this hugely influential work purports to tell the history of Britain over a period of nearly two thousand years, from its foundation as a kingdom by the Trojan exile Brutus to the coming of the Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries. The English quickly adopted Geoffrey's account as the first part of their own national history, and it was not long before the Welsh followed suit. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, both the English and the Welsh made the idea of an ancient British heritage the historical cornerstone of their national identity. Geoffrey's pseudohistory provided both nations with a distinguished past of the greatest antiquity, but for both, the idea of a unique Britishness was also a way of defining themselves against one another. The English used it as a way of advancing their claims to dominion over Wales, the Welsh to give an ideological backbone to their resistance against the English. The notion of an ancient British heritage had such a powerful hold on the English imagination that “Britain” came to be identified with the kingdom of England itself, in explicit distinction from Wales and Scotland. As I shall try to show, the construction of Britain as England (particularly as distinguished from Scotland) is the primary meaning in the core tradition of medieval and early modern English national historiography. However, the equation of Britain with the kingdom of England is complicated by a parallel tradition in which the entire island was called “England.” Medieval historians were fond of observing that the island of Britain “was once called Albion and now England.”Footnote 4 When we put this commonplace together with the idea that “Britain” is the old name for the kingdom of England itself, we have the medieval origins of the still common English habit of treating “Britain” and “British” as synonyms for “England” and “English,” while simultaneously referring to the whole British state as “England.”
Along with repeated attempts, both real and theoretical, to assert the English crown's presumed right of suzerainty over Scotland, the English claim to an exclusive Britishness was part of the background to the Scottish invention of “great Britain” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Though some medieval English historians displayed a general knowledge of British geography, they showed no great interest in the topic, and—with the exception of Geoffrey of Monmouth—virtually none in the notion of a greater British polity. It was left to the Scots to resurrect this idea in a new form, in the conception of a larger Britain in which Scots and English were both equally “Britons.” Though this idea did not stop the English from believing they had a unique title to Britishness, it proved powerful enough in the long run to mitigate the worst effects of the Anglocentric construction of Britain, and, of course, the political utility of the Scottish concept eventually turned out to be such that it became, in a developed form, the conceptual basis for the British state of 1707.
I have chosen Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae as my starting point because it exercised such a profound influence on English national historiography and, as Hay remarks, “did more than anything else to make men conscious of the term Britain.”Footnote 5 My decision to end with Elizabethan ideas of Britain is not altogether arbitrary. Though the attempt by James VI and I to create a kingdom of Great Britain was unsuccessful, it introduced a new dimension to the whole issue, and so the eve of James's accession seems an appropriate place to stop. The other boundary I have observed is a national one. While I touch from time to time on the role of the British idea in the construction of Welsh national identity, any fuller exploration of this topic is beyond my competence. When it comes to Scottish conceptions of “Britain” and “Great Britain” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it also seems unnecessary to go over ground that has already been covered by other scholars.Footnote 6 These Scottish ideas appear only insofar as they supply a contrast to English thinking on the subject. This investigation, then, is largely concerned with the various ways in which the English conceived of Britain.
I have organized the main part of my discussion into four sections. The first deals with the geopolitical concept of Britain as the whole island (tota insula) in which Loegria, Kambria, and Albania (the precursors of England, Wales, and Scotland) were parts of a larger British imperium. Since this is familiar territory, my discussion is fairly brief, outlining the political implications of the concept and the ambiguities arising from it. In the next section I trace the process by which “Britain” came to be construed as the kingdom of England itself, from the origins of this idea in the “Variant version” of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia through Wace's Roman de Brut to the prose Brut of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The subsequent section explores the closely related idea of England (or a restricted “Britain”) as almost an island, physically separate from Scotland. This conception has not been investigated before. I suggest that this line of geographical thinking about Britain can be traced back to Bede's description of the British landmass as being almost bisected by two “arms of the sea” (the firths of Forth and Clyde), with the southern part occupied by the Britons and the northern by hostile peoples. This conception had many verbal and visual representations in the Middle Ages, and I suggest that it formed an important part of the tradition behind the Elizabethan image of England as a “sceptred isle.” Finally, I discuss the various constructions of “Britain” and “Great Britain” that were current from the late fifteenth century to the eve of James's accession to the English throne.
“Britain” Conceived as the Whole Island: Implications and Ambiguities
Geoffrey's whole-island perspective contributes to the ambiguous and enigmatic quality that readers have often detected in the Historia. The work appears to be the product of two conflicting allegiances, both of which are served (though in different ways) by the idea of a pan-Britannic polity. To Welsh readers, Geoffrey's repeated allusions to the island of Britain would surely have recalled the Ynys Prydein of ancient tradition—the Island of Britain of which the Welsh, the original Britons, were the true proprietors. The Prophecies of Merlin, which form the central section of the Historia, would also have had a particular resonance for Welsh readers. This collection of dark sayings cloaked in figurative language has a markedly Celtic bias, and some of the Prophecies can be read as containing a barely disguised appeal to Welsh national sentiments and aspirations, notably in their vision of a restored and unified Britain.Footnote 7 Geoffrey also chose to end the whole work with the promise that the island would be restored to the descendants of the Britons (i.e., the Welsh) at some time in the distant future. John Gillingham has argued that Geoffrey's purpose was to further the reputation of the Welsh as a nation by “giving them an honorable and civilized past,” the work's immediate occasion, he suggests, being the revolt of 1136–38, when Welsh fortunes seemed temporarily to prosper.Footnote 8
However, key aspects of the Historia, such as its imperial character, its multiple dedications to the king and to various prominent members of the Anglo-Norman nobility, and the topicality of its main theme (the dangers of division and the virtue of a strong monarchy), leave no doubt that it was written to serve Anglo-Norman interests.Footnote 9 Among recent commentators, Paul Dalton presents a persuasively argued and carefully documented case for the view that Geoffrey wrote the work with an eye to current political affairs and “blended history, prophecy, and topicality in a way that reflected and appealed to contemporary concerns about the civil war and the threat it posed to the continuance of Norman domination of England.”Footnote 10 Though he concentrates on the theme of unity and division, Dalton does not see a conflict with the sections of the Prophecies that seem to imply allegiance to the Welsh. He argues that the passages concerned should be read as a reminder of the dangers facing the Anglo-Norman establishment from the Welsh and their Celtic allies.
Such a reading has interesting implications for the conception of “Britain” in the Historia. If the history of Geoffrey's Britannia is to be read primarily as a warning of the dangers facing England at the time the work was written, the interpretative emphasis is shifted away from imperial and expansionist concerns to the governance of England itself. This makes considerable sense. In the early years of Stephen's reign (1135–54), one imagines that Geoffrey and his intended audience would have been less interested in dreams of a pan-Britannic empire than in the immediate problems of ensuring stable government and securing England against Welsh rebellion and incursions by the Scots. It could therefore be argued that despite its focus on Britain as the entire island, the Historia encourages an exemplary reading of ancient British history. The applicability of the lessons of the past to the England of the late 1130s pushed other concerns to the background and paradoxically paved the way for the construction of Britain as England that we find in the main tradition of medieval and early modern national historiography.Footnote 11 When Hugh Thomas observes that Geoffrey's work did not “create or sustain any substantial sense of Britishness as an ethnic or national identity in England,” he is right as regards any wider sense of “Britishness” but underestimates the extent to which the Historia encourages an exemplary, quasi-metaphorical understanding of “Britain” and the readiness of the English to embrace the fiction of an ancient British heritage as a key part of their historical self-definition.Footnote 12
At any rate, attempts to pin the Historia down to some unequivocal interpretation have a way of ending in the recognition that Geoffrey is, as John Gillingham remarks, “a complex and ambiguous writer.”Footnote 13 This is the quality that made possible the work's appropriation by both the English and the Welsh as part of their respective national histories.Footnote 14 The ink was barely dry when the former laid claim to it. Writing in the late 1130s, Geffrei Gaimar used it as the basis for the lost Estoire des Bretuns that preceded his Estoire des Engleis, and Alfred of Beverley (who died between 1154 and 1157) included whole sections of Geoffrey's work in his Annales. Alfred omitted the concluding episode of Cadwallader, last king of the Britons, so that his account of the final defeat of the British by the Saxons leads straight into a history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, without any mention of the promised restoration of British rule. However, he retained Geoffrey's conception of Britannia as the whole island, showing none of the tendency to play down this idea that we find in the Variant version of the Historia (described below).Footnote 15 Though the Welsh were less quick off the mark, translations of the Historia came to play a central part in Welsh national historiography, the Welsh Brut becoming the most widely copied Welsh text of the late Middle Ages.Footnote 16 While the Welsh Brut as such lies outside the scope of this article, it had a significant if indirect impact on later English ideas of “Britishness.” The Welsh construction of a British past based on the Historia provided the English (who had adopted the same ancient history) with a device for advancing their claim to a historic right of dominion over Wales. This effect first appeared in the fifteenth century and was a covert element in Elizabethan celebrations of Welshness.Footnote 17
The Invention of “British” England: The Variant Version of Geoffrey's Historia, Wace, and the Prose Brut
A different construction of “Britain” from Geoffrey's whole-island concept appears in the revision of the Historia known as the “Variant version” (as distinct from the common text, or “vulgate”). Produced by an unknown reviser some time between Geoffrey's completion of the Historia (ca. 1138) and the appearance of Wace's Roman de Brut (1155), this new version had an influence on English historiography out of all proportion to the tiny number of its surviving manuscript copies.Footnote 18 It was the main source for Wace's poem, whose narrative in turn provided the basis for the British section of the prose Brut (ca. 1300). The first truly comprehensive history of England in the vernacular, the prose Brut became the most widely copied secular text of the late Middle Ages in England, and between the fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries it was the standard history of England.
The most recent editor of the Variant version remarks that the reviser “tries to some extent to reconcile the vulgate account with other historical works,” adding, however, that his “attempts to reconcile the Historia with other sources are … only sporadic.”Footnote 19 The changes the reviser made to Geoffrey's geopolitical terminology show a similar inconsistency, and their rationale and significance are not always easy to determine. Though he kept all of Geoffrey's references to “Britannia,” he removed a great many (though not all) of his frequent allusions to Britain as an island.Footnote 20 Among numerous examples, chapter 32 (Thorpe translation, 87) includes no less than three such alterations. The vulgate tells us that after Cordelia's death the young men Marganus and Cunedagius “divided up the island” (partiti sunt iuuenes insulam); the Variant version substitutes “the kingdom” (partiti sunt iuuenes regnum). Where the vulgate relates how Marganus's evil counselors persuade him that it is shameful that he “should not rule over the entire island,” the Variant version has “not have the rule of the whole kingdom.” Finally, when Cunedagius kills his cousin, the vulgate says he acquired “the kingship of the whole island,” while the Variant version again substitutes “the whole kingdom.”Footnote 21 One of the most striking departures from the vulgate text occurs in the chapter describing the devastation of Britain by Gormund. The vulgate describes the devastation of “almost the whole island,” adding that Gormund “gave the greater part of it, which was called Loegria, to the Saxons.”Footnote 22 In the rest of the chapter, and the following one, Geoffrey's focus was on the Britons’ loss of their kingdom and the destruction that accompanied it. In the Variant, Gormund lays waste “the whole region,” and the reviser developed the reference to the Saxons into a reflection on the genesis of England: “Hence the Saxons who possessed Loegria were called Angles, and after them the land (terra) was afterwards called England.”Footnote 23
This reference to “Anglia” is particularly interesting because it suggests that although the Variant reviser clearly thought of Geoffrey's narrative as the early history of England, he was aware (as his retention of “Loegria” shows) that “Britannia” and “Anglia” were not the same.Footnote 24 At the same time, his grasp of British geography sometimes seems shakier than Geoffrey’s, as it does in his version of the passage where Belinus orders the construction of a road down the middle of Britain. Geoffrey wrote “and he ordered a road to be constructed from stones and mortar which would cut through the island from the Cornish Sea to the coast of Caithness and lead by a direct route to the cities on the way.” He understood what he was talking about when he said “from the Cornish Sea to the coast of Caithness” (the medieval equivalent of “From Land's End to John o’ Groats”).Footnote 25 The Variant has “ordering furthermore that highways be constructed from stones and mortar, leading to the cities—that is to say from the Cornish Sea to the coast of Caithness at the entrance to Albany; in other words, they would stretch from the southern region to northern parts” (39; 93). The way the reviser takes two bites at his explanation (“that is to say … ; in other words”) suggests uncertainty and a lack of confidence in the understanding of his readers, as does the vagueness of “from the southern region to northern parts.”
Though we can only speculate about the Variant reviser's motives for removing many of the references to the entire island of Britain, the outcome was that Geoffrey's emphasis on this aspect was greatly attenuated. This was a development of great significance, as it opened the way for the new construction of “Britain” that we find in Wace's Roman de Brut, which draws extensively on the Variant. In Wace's poem the Prophecies of Merlin have gone and with them any hint of divided allegiances and pro-Welsh sympathies.Footnote 26 Wace omitted Geoffrey's opening description of Britain, supplying instead his own introduction, which instructs us to read what follows as the history of England. He will explain, he says, “who they were and whence they came, who once upon a time were the rulers of England (Engleterre).”Footnote 27 The result is a reorientation of the whole narrative.
Wace did not completely discard Geoffrey's opening prolepsis about the downfall of the Britons but introduced it, significantly altered, when he got to the passage in the Historia (21; 72) about the renaming of Albion. Developing Geoffrey's reference to the Trojans calling their language “British,” he tells how “the language and the name lasted until Gurmunt arrived; he drove out the Britons and handed it over to the Saxons who, from being Angles, were called English and called the land England. They drove out all the Britons, who never regained power” (1192–1200; 31). When Geoffrey invited us to look ahead to the end of his history, his emphasis was on the downfall of the Britons and the moral failings that brought it about. Wace showed little interest in the first of these themes and none at all in the second. What mattered to him was what R. William Leckie calls “the passage of dominion” and the change of name from Britain to England.Footnote 28 In effect, Wace substituted a prolepsis of his own that looks forward to Gormund and the triumph of the Angles as described in chapter 186/7 of the Variant version (Roman de Brut, 13649–58; 343).
Wace's poem was a key stage in the process by which ancient Britain came to be seen almost exclusively as the historical precursor of England. Part of the wholesale rewriting of the past in terms of the present (manifested most obviously in Wace's pervasive anachronism), the collapsing of historical differences between ancient Britain and twelfth-century England extended even to the name of the former, so that the idea of historical continuity became a presumption of geopolitical identity. Britain and England became synonyms. However, Wace's equation of Britain and England was different from the earlier tradition according to which “Britannia” and “Albion” were the old names for a greater “Anglia” comprising the whole island. Wace's England was the actual kingdom of England, not some larger realm of English aspiration. Despite occasional gestures toward the idea of Britain as a larger territory including smaller kingdoms or regions, it is plain that he thought of it primarily as the old name for England, conceived as the territory bounded in the west and north by the Welsh marches and the Scottish borders. In Wace's celebrated prologue to part 3 of the Roman de Rou, after remarking that Britain is now called England, he added that South Wales was once called Demetia, North Wales Venedocia, and Scotland Albany (lines 21–23).Footnote 29
Through its influence on vernacular English historiography, Wace's Roman de Brut seems to have played a key part in promoting the idea that “Britain” was merely another name for the actual kingdom of England. Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, this concept coexisted with the idea of the whole island as a greater England, and (rather less commonly) the geopolitically accurate conception of Britain as a collection of territories of which England was one. Two documents from the reign of Edward I throw some light on the way that different meanings of “Britain” could be invoked. Taken together, these documents imply that different usages—in this case the whole island as an assemblage of territories including England and the island conceived simply as “England”—may have been used interchangeably as the occasion demanded. Edward's letter to the Pope in 1301 defending his claim of suzerainty over Scotland relates how “Brutus landed … upon a certain island called, at that time, Albion. … He called it, after his own name, Britain, and his people Britons. … He gave to his first born, Locrine, that part of Britain now called England.”Footnote 30 However, a report to the king on Scottish objections to the arguments set out in the first letter refers to “the island once called Britain, and now England.”Footnote 31 A possible interpretation of these different usages is that they are a matter of register, and that the appeal to “Britannia” as that term had been employed by Geoffrey of Monmouth and others may have been thought appropriate for a learned international audience. The second document is an internal memorandum in which there was no need to keep up appearances and perhaps reflects what people in the English court really thought.
The vernacular prose histories of England that dominate English historical writing in the later Middle Ages either do not refer to “Britain” at all or use it as a synonym for England. There is no mention of Britain in the first of these, the brief thirteenth-century chronicle sometimes known as Le livere de reis de Brittanie, where the narrative begins with the arrival of Brutus in “Engleterre.”Footnote 32 This work was one of the sources for the much fuller history known as the prose Brut, which appeared at the end of the century. The author of the prose Brut makes it clear that “Britain” is to be understood as England: “And whan Brut had sowte all þe lond in lengthe & brede, he fonde A land þat ioyned to Brytaigne in þe north; and þat land Brut ʒaf to Albanac his sone, and he lete calle yt Albanye after his name, þat now is called Scotland. And Brut fonde anothir Cuntre toward þe west; & þat he ʒaf to Cambre his other sone, & he lete calle yt Cambre aftyr his name, & now is called Walys.”Footnote 33
The French prose Brut went through a succession of continuations and revisions in the first half of the fourteenth century, culminating in the so-called Long Version, which was the basis for a faithful translation into Middle English. In all its versions, the prose Brut strikingly exemplifies the “essentially Anglocentric approach” that R. R. Davies describes as “the dominant historiographical tradition in England from at least the twelfth to the twentieth centuries.” In this tradition, remarks Davies, “it was the making of England and the unbroken continuity of English history which commanded attention and required explanation. The rest of the British Isles was, literally and metaphorically, peripheral to this central concern.”Footnote 34 Like Wace, the unknown author of the original prose Brut showed none of Geoffrey of Monmouth's interest in the whole island of Britain and the way it was ruled. His concern was the governance of England. In his narrative, Britain was merely the old name for England, and the purpose of its history was to supply the kingdom with a distinguished ancient past and with events and persons that furnish exemplary patterns of good and bad government. When the narrative was later extended to include events up to 1333, England's greatly increased involvement in Wales and Scotland during the reigns of Edward I and his immediate successors meant that these two nations are a noticeable presence in this part of the prose Brut, whose Long Version ends with a stirring account of the English victory over the Scots at Halidon Hill. Nevertheless, in the account of Edward II's reign as a whole, and especially in the climactic episode of his deposition, its primary concern is England and the way it is governed.Footnote 35
Even when describing relations with Wales and Scotland, the Long Version evinces no interest in “Britain” conceived as some larger polity. If anything, it reinforces the original equation of Britain with the kingdom of England. The chapter dealing with Brut's discovery of these neighboring countries is given the heading “Coment Bruyt fist Loundres et appella ceste terre Brutagne, Escoce Albyn, et Gales Cambre.”Footnote 36 In the English translation of the text, this reads “How Brut made London, & Called þis land Brytaigne, & Scotland Albyne, & Walys Camber.”Footnote 37 The same usage occurs when the author of the later sections mentions the marriage of David II of Scotland to Edward III's sister Joan and takes the opportunity to rehearse the argument that the kings of Scotland owed homage to the kings of England: “And fro þe tyme þat Brut hadde conquerede Albyon, and nempnede þe land after his owen name Brytayngn, þat now is callede Engeland, after þe name of Engist; and so was þe reaume of Scotland holden of þe reaume of Engeland, and of þe croune, by feaute and homage.”Footnote 38 This reminder of the feudal terms in which English kings thought of their relationship with Scotland has a further bearing on our understanding of “Britain” in the Middle Ages. It is true that we occasionally come across the idea of a pan-Britannic imperium, for instance in Gerald of Wales, who praised Henry II for “including by his powerful hand in one monarchy the whole island of Britain.”Footnote 39 However, as David Carpenter observes, what Henry actually sought was overlordship over the other rulers, not unification through their elimination. The same applied to Edward I, whose view of Britain was “very much one of separate rulers owing allegiance to the king of England.”Footnote 40 While English kings routinely appealed to precedents from the Britain of Geoffrey of Monmouth in pursuit of such claims (and continued to do so up to the time of Henry VIII), the aim of recreating a larger “British” polity does not appear to have been a significant part of their thinking.
The Idea of “British” England as an Island
In his explicit (summary conclusion) to the prologue, the medieval editor of the Long Version of the prose Brut gives a surprising twist to the idea that Albion and Britain were the old names for the present kingdom of England: “Here endeth þe prolog of Albyon, þat þo (at that time) was an Ile.” If the writer is saying that Albion was an island “at that time,” then this clearly implies that he no longer considers it to be. Thus, he cannot be using the name Albion to refer to the whole island of Britain. Does he mean to imply that the southern half of the latter used to be an island itself? It looks like a way of trying to resolve some of the conflicting meanings of “Britain” and “England” and seems significant because it implies awareness of the problem. The writer appears to have in mind a conception of Britain that emphasizes the geographical separateness of the southern and northern parts of the whole island. It occurs elsewhere in medieval writings and seems to derive ultimately from Bede's account of attacks on the Britons “by two extremely fierce races from over the waters, the Irish from the west and the Picts from the north.”Footnote 41 “We call them races from over the waters,” explains Bede, “not because they dwelt outside Britain but because they were separated from the Britons by two wide and long arms of the sea, one of which enters the land from the east, the other from the west, though they do not meet.”Footnote 42
Bede's account was very influential. In the middle of the thirteenth century it was given visual form in Matthew Paris's maps of Britain, in three of which the firths of Forth and Clyde almost meet, leaving only a narrow isthmus connecting “Scocia ultra marina” (Scotland over the water) to the southern part of the landmass.Footnote 43 This construction of British geography seems to be one of the factors that contributed to the restricted sense of “Britain” as the kingdom of England itself and indeed to the idea of “British” England as an island (or almost an island) physically separate from Scotland.
Further light is shed on this idea by the account of the relation between Scotland and “Greater Britain” in Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, whose later versions, from the mid-fourteenth century, were contemporary with the Long Version of the prose Brut. Higden described Scotland as the northern part of the larger geographical entity of greater Britain, “Britannia maior.” However, echoing Bede, he added that it is separated from the latter on the southern side by “arms of the sea”: “Vulgatum est quod Scotia, prout hodie nuncupatur, promunctorium et borealis pars Britanniae majoris, marinis brachiis ab ea separata versus austrum; in reliquis lateribus undique cincta mari.” Trevisa's English translation magnified the potential ambiguity, rendering “ab ea” (from it) as “from Bretayne”: “Hit is comoun sawe þat þe contray þat now hatte Scotlond is an out strecching, and is þe norþ partie of þe more Bretayne, and is departed on þe south side from Bretayne wiþ armes of þe see, and in þe oþer sides al aboute byclipped wiþ þe see” (bk. 1, chap. 37).Footnote 44 Though the translator's intention was doubtless to clarify “ea,” his version tends to undermine the first part of the original sentence by explicitly suggesting that Scotland was not part of Britain after all, but geographically separate. A hundred years later, the printed editions of the Polychronicon (1482, 1495, and 1527) discarded the distinction between “Britain” and “greater (or `more') Britain” that Higden and Trevisa may have implied: “The Countrey whiche nowe is named Scotland is an out stretchyng of the north partye of britayn, and is departed in the southside from britain with armes of the see.”Footnote 45
Since consistency was the exception rather than the rule in medieval and early modern discussions of these matters, it is not surprising to find Higden's chapter 39 beginning with the stock history of the names of the island: “Firste þis ilond hiʒte Albion. … Aftirward Bruyt conquered þis lond and cleped hit Bretayne after his owne name; þanne Saxons oþer Englische conquered þat lond, and cleped hit Anglia, þat is Engelond.”Footnote 46 However, chapter 43, “De partibus insulae principalibus” (Of the principal parts of the island), provides a more considered account of the geography and political divisions of Britain as a whole. Here “Britannia” is clearly the whole island: “After þe firste Brutes tyme þe ilond of Bretayne bygan for to haue þre principal parties, þat beeþ Loegria, and Cambria, þat is Wales, and Albania, þat is now Scotland.”Footnote 47 Higden, like Bede, described the “two arms of the sea” that almost bisect Britain in the north and asserted that “Albania” was the territory to the north of this division: “þe secounde party of Bretayne hatte Albania, þat is Scotlond, … and streccheþ from þe tweye forsaide armes of þe see norþward anon to þe see of Norwey.” Faced with the problem of southern Scotland, he explained that the territory from the River Tweed up to “the Scottish Sea” (the firth of Forth) belonged to the Kings of Northumberland until Kenneth MacAlpine defeated the Picts, “and so ioyned þe contray to þe kyngdom of Scotland.”
A number of points emerge from Higden's various accounts of Britain. Despite his mention of the Albion-Britain-England nomenclature, he had a well-developed conception of Britain as a larger territorial unit of which the kingdoms of England and Scotland were constituent parts. However, his description of Scotland as being separated from “Britain” by “arms of the sea” suggests that he envisaged the whole territory of mainland Britain as it was described by Bede and depicted by Matthew Paris, an island almost cut in two by the firths of Forth and Clyde.
In this part of Higden's discussion at any rate, the northern part is identified with Scotland as a whole, part of Britain but separate from the main body. It is interesting that Higden should present this view of the whole island and its constituent parts as a commonplace. If it was, he himself contributed to its currency; like the prose Brut, the Polychronicon enjoyed a very wide circulation, with well over a hundred surviving manuscripts of the Latin version alone.Footnote 48
If we put Higden's “commonplace” together with the examples I have just cited and the mysterious assertion that “Albion was once an isle” in the explicit to the prologue in the Long Version of the prose Brut, we have apparent evidence for a tradition in which England (often identified with a geographically restricted “Britain”) was conceived not just as the southern part of the whole island but as very nearly an island itself, physically distinct from the territory “whiche nowe is named Scotland.” The corollary is that Scotland is an island too, and indeed at least one late fourteenth-century manuscript of the Polychronicon begins Higden's chapter on Scotland (bk. 1, chap. 37) with the heading “De insula Scotia.”Footnote 49 Geographical thinking along these lines must surely be one of the factors behind the Shakespearean image of England as a “sceptred isle” sequestered from a hostile world. As several commentators have observed, the metaphor has proved astonishingly persistent. Bizarre as its later manifestations often are, however, its use in the late sixteenth century may not be merely an example of wishful—and willful—thinking.Footnote 50 Something more than a figure of speech, Shakespeare's lines would appear to reflect a commonly held perception of the geographical separation of the territories of England (or England and Wales) and Scotland.Footnote 51
Dramatic support for this suggestion appears to be provided by another sixteenth-century source, Fabyan's Chronicle of 1516, where there is an odd passage in which “this Ile of Brytayne” seems to be identified with “mydell Englande.” The passage in question has been the subject of recent commentary, and before the interpretation that has been put on it becomes carved in stone, it will be as well to set the record straight. It occurs as Fabyan describes how Brutus bestowed (or “beset”) the various parts of Britain on his three sons, Locrine, Camber, and Albanact: “To the first and eldest he beset this Ile of Brytayne the whiche after was named mydell Englande whiche is to meane Troynovant with all the Countres there about lying, conteyninge Eest West & South. And for this cause and for it shulde sounde towarde the name of the sayd Lotryne, this parte of Brytayne was longe after called Loegria or Logiers.”Footnote 52
In their interpretation of this passage, Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor claim that Fabyan “did his best to clarify matters by explaining that the ‘Isle of Britain’ was identical with ‘Middle England’.”Footnote 53 However, it would have been an astonishing departure from the story as it had been known since the twelfth century to claim that Brutus bestowed “the isle of Britain” on Locrine, and not just the part called Loegria. And of course in the very next sentence we find that Fabyan is not talking about “the isle of Britain” at all but about the “parte of Brytayne” that “was longe after called Loegria or Logiers.” The whole passage is about “parts of Britain.” After describing Brutus's disposition of Cambria and its geographical relation to Loegria, Fabyan goes on to define Albanact's portion as “the North parte of this Ile,” and the whole chapter ends “Thus whenne Brute had deueyded this Ile of Brytayne as before is shewed in thre parts, and had holden the principate therof nobly … , he dyed and was enteryd or buryed at Troynovant or London.” “Troynovant with all the Countres there about lying” clearly refers to Loegria, or “Middle England” as it came to be called.Footnote 54 I would suggest that there is a compositor's error here. One possibility is an eye skip when the compositor was setting type from a manuscript that read something like “To the first and eldest he beset [that part of] this Ile of Brytayne the whiche after was named mydell Englande.” The omission of the first of the two nominal groups would have left the grammar intact and would have been easy to overlook (proofreading as we understand it being of course unknown).
It might be argued that this part of Fabyan's text stood unchanged in three subsequent editions (1533, 1542, and 1559) and that this in itself is evidence that readers endorsed the equation of “the isle of Britain” with “Middle England.” However, it is hard to see how anyone could read the passage past its first sentence and miss the point that, like all other accounts of the episode before and after, it is about the division of the larger territory of Britain into smaller kingdoms. The most one might say is that the opening sentence would have been vaguely consonant with the old commonplace about the names Albion, Britain, and England, already repeated in the list of contents, whose fourth entry is a summary of how “This Brute … entred firste the Ile of Albyon which he after named Brytayne and nowe is called Englande.” At any rate, the “mydell Englande” part of the passage does not seem a very secure foundation for speculations about the meaning of “Britain” in the early sixteenth century.Footnote 55
England, Britain, and Greater Britain
It was perhaps because the English use of “Britain” to mean England had become so commonplace that a new usage, “Britannia maior” (greater Britain), meaning the entire territory of England, Wales, and Scotland, began to emerge in the fifteenth century. Denys Hay documents the changes in the signification of the term from its long-standing use in the romances and elsewhere to distinguish Britain (but often England) as from “Britannia minor” (Brittany) to something approaching its modern sense.Footnote 56 As I have noted, Higden used the term on at least one occasion to mean the whole island, describing Scotland as “the northern part of the larger Britain.” Trevisa rendered “Britannia maior” as “þe more Bretayne,” as did the anonymous translator of MS Harl. 2261.Footnote 57 The phrase here may therefore imply a distinction from “Britain” without any qualifying adjective, which in the fourteenth century, as the prose Brut shows, meant primarily the kingdom of England. In the Middle Ages, however, the use of the term “greater Britain” in this broader sense by the English seems to be rare, and it is significant that the first “clear-cut case” of what Hay identifies as a new usage should come from Scotland. The occasion was the proposed marriage in 1474 between the daughter of Edward IV and the son of James III, when the Edinburgh commissioners drawing up the proposal declared their aim to be the peace and prosperity of “this Nobill Isle, callit gret Britanee.”Footnote 58
This Scottish construction of an undifferentiated and peaceful “gret Britanee” is clarified in the pious hope expressed by Archibald Whitelaw, Archdeacon of Lothian, on the occasion of the unsuccessful royal marriage negotiations of ten years later that “the difference between an Englishman and a Scot may not henceforward be remembered.”Footnote 59 The idea achieved an authoritative statement in John Mair's Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), in which the Scottish author argues that “all who were born in Britain are Britons.”Footnote 60 Since the English conquest of Wales, says Mair, the multiple kingdoms into which Britain was once divided have been reduced to two: “Hence all the part of the island which is held by the king of the southern island is called the kingdom of England, and the remaining part the kingdom of Scotland. Nevertheless all these are Britons, which I think is evident from what has been said.”Footnote 61
The idea of a Britain in which the Scots and the English have equal status has no parallel in medieval English usage. In the sixteenth century, Polydore Vergil came nearer to it than most earlier authors in England when he began his Anglica historia (first printed in 1534) with a reference to “Britain as a whole, which nowadays is called by the double name of England and Scotland.”Footnote 62 “Britain as a whole” is presumably so defined to distinguish it from the Britain-as-England of the ubiquitous prose Brut, whose last printed edition, under the now usual title The Chronicles of England, was published in 1526. The formulation also suggests the avoidance of “greater Britain” (Britannia maior) for similar reasons—the first page of the actual narrative in Wynkyn de Worde's 1529 edition of Malory's Le Morte Darthur describes Arthur as “somtyme kyng of grete Brytayne now called Englande.”Footnote 63
The use of the term “Great Britain” in this period provides a telling example of the need for caution when we are dealing with “British” terminology. Nobody could miss the point that the Scots commissioners’ “gret Britanee” and Wynkyn de Worde's “grete Brytayne” mean completely different things. However, such differences are not always so obvious. In April 1604, when the lord chancellor, Ellesmere, announced the king's proposals for a new kingdom of Great Britain to the assembled lords and commons, he invoked a precedent from the time of Henry VIII and the attempt to arrange a marriage between Edward, prince of Wales, and the infant Mary, queen of Scots. On that occasion, Ellesmere explained, it was proposed to bring the names of England and Scotland “to one name, to wit, Brittayne.”Footnote 64 Evidence of the thinking behind the earlier proposal to which Ellesmere referred is provided by the Epistle Exhortatorie that Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and lord protector, addressed “to the nobilitie, and counsailors, gentlemen and the commons … of the realme of Scotlande” in 1548.Footnote 65 Somerset did his best to appear reasonable and conciliatory, calling the Scots “to libertie, to amitie, to equalitie with vs,” and declaring that the two nations “be, & should bee, like as twoo brethren of one Islande of greate Britayn.”Footnote 66 Yet we may doubt whether the “greate Britayne” envisaged by the lord protector would have had much in common with the benign union of equals proposed by Mary Stuart's son more than fifty years later. At the time of writing, the English had laid waste large tracts of southern Scotland and established garrisons up the east coast from Berwick to Dundee. Somerset began by reminding the Scots that “we [are] superiours in the feld, Masters of a great part of your realme,” and his pamphlet is full of warnings about the direct and indirect consequences of turning down the English proposals: “Whose bodies shall smarte for it? Whose landes shalbee wasted? Whose houses burned? What realme made desolate?”Footnote 67 His Scottish readers would have recognized all the assurances, the professions of goodwill, and the warnings as part of the rhetoric of siege warfare.Footnote 68
However, a conception similar to Mair's greater Britain makes a brief appearance in English Protestant usage in the middle of the sixteenth century. S. T. Bindoff notes the use of the term “maior Britannia” in the title of John Bale's Summary of Famous Writers of Greater Britain (1548)—and, he might have added, in that of its greatly expanded successor, the Catalogue of Famous Writers (1557–59).Footnote 69 In the Summary, Greater Britain is defined as England, Wales, and Scotland, and in the Catalogue as England and Scotland. In both these works of militant apocalyptic Protestantism, Welsh and Scottish writers are given parity of treatment with English ones. Volume 2 of the Catalogue includes a “briefer description” of Britain, by George Lyly, John Leland, “and other writers of our time,” which begins, like Polydore Vergil, by observing that “Britain is divided into two parts, or rather two kingdoms,” the southern part now being called England, the northern part Scotland.Footnote 70 The recognition that England and Scotland shared a common Protestant history and cause is evident also in the Acts and Monuments of Bale's friend and protégé John Foxe. Though Foxe does not use the term “Britain,” he refers to the two kingdoms as a single “realm.” The title page of the first English edition (1563) announces that it will describe “the great persecutions [and] horrible troubles, that haue bene wrought and practised by the Romishe prelates, speciallye in this realme of England and Scotlande, from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande, vnto the tyme nowe present.”Footnote 71 Foxe more than once uses inclusive phrases like “this our countrie of England and Scotland,” and his account of Roman Catholic persecution includes Scottish Protestant martyrs such as George Wishart and Patrick Hamilton.Footnote 72
How widespread these favorable attitudes to Scotland were is impossible to say. During Elizabeth's reign the Acts and Monuments was reprinted four times, the editions of 1583 and 1596 repeating the phrase “this realme of England and Scotlande” on their title pages. One suspects, though, that the formula would have meant different things to Scottish and English readers, and that if the latter thought about other parts of Britain at all, they would be inclined to do so in terms of English hegemony. On “British” matters, Bale's influence is apparent among the defenders of England's fictitious ancient British heritage, a group who were hardly receptive to notions of equality with the Scots in some greater Britain. But, at any rate, these inclusive gestures seem to have been drowned out by a surge of hostility toward the Scots that began in the 1570s and continued until the end of the century. In two notable instances—William Harrison's Description of Britain, which opens Holinshed's Chronicles (1577 and 1587), and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1593–96)—this animosity toward the Scots is part of an exclusively Anglocentric construction of “Britain.” These authors share the apocalyptic Protestantism of Bale and Foxe, who were strong influences on both; in the Description and The Faerie Queene alike, “Britain” is also exclusively Protestant, substantially defined in opposition to a feared and reviled Roman Catholicism. However, any sense of affinity with their reformed brothers and sisters north of the border has gone, to be replaced by a sense of angry and embattled Englishness.
At the same time, the Anglocentric constructions of “Britain” in Harrison and Spenser take significantly different forms. Harrison refers repeatedly to “our Iland,” “this Iland,” “this our Iland,” and “our Britaine,” and his fairly full and precise geography makes it clear that he is talking about the whole island of Britain.Footnote 73 However, he is choosy about who can be admitted to the ranks of the British. In the “Catalog of the kings and princes of this Iland,” with which the 1587 Description ends, Geoffrey of Monmouth's rulers of ancient Britain are allowed in, as are the rulers of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the kings and queens of England up to Elizabeth, and the princes of Wales.Footnote 74 Of Scotland and its rulers there is no trace. Elsewhere in the 1587 Description, the Scots are very much present, but only as malign interlopers. In the 1577 edition of the Chronicles, they are briefly dismissed as late arrivals in “this our island.” In the revision of ten years later Harrison has nothing but abuse for the northerners, vilifying them as thieves and cannibals and insisting that they are “strangers” who have no right to live in Britain and who have only been allowed to do so because they have “so planted themselves in these parts, that unto our time that portion of the land cannot be cleansed of them.”Footnote 75
In the vast expanse of Spenser's Faerie Queene, a passing reference to the River Tweed as “the limit betwixt Logris land / And Albany” (bk. 4, canto 10, st. 36) is the nearest the poet gets to actually naming Scotland. Apart from this line, the sole representation of Scotland in the poem occurs in the passage in book 5 relating the trial and execution of Duessa, in her aspect as Mary, queen of Scots. The dark opposite of Elizabeth as Mercilla and the other ideal forms the English queen takes in the poem, Duessa is the embodiment of female evil. The absoluteness of this conception, combined with the account of her execution (and the way the poem sedulously ignores the common knowledge that Mary's son was likely to become the next king of England), brings Spenser very close to Harrison's less urbane combination of vilification and historical erasure. In contrast to Harrison, however, Spenser was signally uninterested in the whole island of Britain. The Faerie Queene has always been seen as a quintessentially English poem, and attempts to redefine its national character as “British” in some wider sense are less than convincing. It does not seem at all obvious that the poem shows Spenser “insisting on regarding political problems in a British rather than an English context.”Footnote 76 Spenser's “Britain,” like that of the prose Brut, is primarily a synonym for England.
The inward-looking, Anglocentric conceptions of Spenser and Harrison are part of a wider climate of feeling toward Scotland. Never far below the surface at any time in English history, a hostile view of Scotland and the Scots had been gaining ground even before Harrison wrote the first version of the Description. Reviewing the records of parliamentary debates in 1571 and 1572, A. N. McLaren notes a “reinterpretation of Scottish identity caused by Mary Stuart's proximity to the English throne.” She remarks that “from being, as they had been deemed by earlier apologists, brothers in Protestantism, the Scots became `strangers' (a term employed with equal venom to describe recusants within England) and `barbarians,' an identification that underpins the language of conquest which features so prominently in these debates.”Footnote 77
A plausible explanation for Harrison's anti-Scottish revisions of 1587 is that Mary's trial and execution gave these attitudes a new lease on life, reinforcing the fear of Roman Catholic conspiracy and reawakening ancient anxieties about Scotland as the natural ally of England's continental enemies. Their virulence appears to have continued undiminished in the remaining years of Elizabeth's reign. The feelings about the Scots apparent in the 1596 Faerie Queene are of a piece with other expressions of anti-Scottish sentiment in the 1590s, when the prevailing attitude seems to have been one of fear and suspicion, with reports of plots between the King of Spain and the Scottish Catholic nobles. In February 1593 Sir Robert Cecil declared that after the defeat of the Armada the king of Spain “hath seene it is but a follie to make a woodden bridge to passe into England. Therfore he hath now found out a surer and a more strong passage into England, namelie by land and by Scottland.” Moreover, says Cecil, the Spanish king has procured himself a highway by bribing the Scots nobility. He has no need to risk confrontation with the Queen's navy by sending another invasion fleet, for “some one paltrie flyboate may escape her Majestie's shipp[s] and carie gould enough to make them traitors and stirr them to sedicion.”Footnote 78 This is the “weasel Scot” whose familiar spectre Shakespeare was to raise at the beginning of Henry V six years later: “For once the eagle England being in prey, / To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot / Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs, / Playing the mouse in absence of the cat, / To tear and havoc more than she can eat.”Footnote 79 Such a climate of feeling and opinion cannot have been very conducive to ideas of Britain that implied any kind of accommodation with Scotland.
The survival of conceptions like those of Spenser and Harrison shows the remarkable adaptability and staying power of the belief that the English have a unique title to “Britishness.” There seems little doubt that the late Elizabethan versions of this old idea contributed in the longer term to a distinctive brand of English national self-perception in which Britain, England, and the Protestant faith are inextricably intertwined. Paradoxically, however, the fictions on which they were based barely outlived the century. Harrison's attempt to trace the reformed English church back to an original purity of doctrine that existed in Albion when it was ruled by the descendants of Japhet was one of the casualties of a more critical approach to antiquarian studies. Spenser's conception of an England whose ancient British heritage rivaled the Trojan ancestry claimed by the Hapsburgs could survive as a poetic fiction, but any literal understanding of these fancies soon crumbled along with the whole pseudohistory bequeathed by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Stripped of the discredited historical fictions from which it had once derived its authority, the myth of “British England” survived because of its sheer usefulness in terms of politics and national self-esteem.
Conclusion
The most obvious general point to emerge from this brief survey is the protean and contingent nature of the terms “Britain” and “British” and their equivalents in Latin and Insular French. We can rarely take their meaning for granted, and when we encounter them we need to pause and ask who is using them, when, and for what purpose. More specifically, we need to be aware of the gulf between the two main conceptions of Britain during the period under consideration. On the one hand, there is the central English construction according to which “Britain” (and even “great Britain”) meant England, or England and Wales, to the exclusion or subordination of Scotland. I have suggested that this tradition overlaps with another in which England, or Britain meaning the southern part of the whole island, was conceived as geographically separate from its northern neighbor. On the other hand, there is the Scottish conception, emerging in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of a larger British polity in which England and Scotland are equal participants.
This idea developed into the imperial Great Britain of Stuart aspiration and led eventually to its political realization, in modified form, in the Union of 1707. Modern historians have emphasized the uncertainties of the road to union, and some recent commentators have highlighted the problematic nature of the concept of Britain itself in the seventeenth century. Colin Kidd has drawn attention to the “competing sub-traditions of Britishness” that existed before the Union, observing that the latter “did not arise out of a sense of shared Britishness.”Footnote 80 Allan I. Macinnes puts the main problem more starkly when he comments that although the imperial vision of the Stuarts “ensured that Britain was always something more than England,” this larger view was not shared by “the English common lawyers who regulated government and parliamentarians who voted supply,” for whom “Britain was England.”Footnote 81
Yet it might be argued that the very capacity of the term “Britain” to accommodate radically different constructions of its meaning was a covert factor in helping to ensure the success of the composite state created in 1707. One of the reasons the English were able to adapt to the new constitutional situation must surely be that it turned out in practice to require no great conceptual adjustment, allowing them to maintain, as they still do, their centuries-old habit of equating Britain with England. For the Scots, however, “Great Britain” opened up a space within which they were free, in the longer term, to develop new and vigorous forms of Scottish national self-definition alongside a wider British patriotism.Footnote 82
